Open Source Announcement for OpenXprocess

This press release is hot off the press. You read it here first!

Date: 1st May, 2009
Location: SOUTHAMPTON, UK.

Ivis Technologies and xProcess Europe announced today that xProcess will now be available under an open source license, expanding its already substantial user base to a much wider community.

Also announced today was the setting up of a new company, OpenXprocess Ltd, to own, manage and support xProcess and supply training mentoring and maintenance services to users worldwide.

xProcess allows users to define project management processes (for example task patterns, artifacts, gateways and workflows) and then run live projects while monitoring targets, deliveries and process compliance. Agile methods for software development such as Scrum, FDD and variants of Unified Process are particularly well supported by the technology, which provides priority-driven ordering of activities and resource balancing. The free download of the product includes pre-configured processes for Scrum and other methods. Read more…

Scrum-xProcess: step by step

I always tell people who are starting with xProcess to try the simplest things first, and in particular to try out "Simple Process" before embarking on processes which have more complex features configured, like the Scrum and FDD processes. This is just so you get the idea of what the scheduler does, how to reprioritise tasks and the effects of adding resources, manually assigning tasks, adding constraints (dependencies) and using the gantt and burndown charts. So it's a good idea to read The Simplest Possible Way to Get a Project Plan before reading this article because that takes you very quickly through those first steps.

So I'm assuming you've had a play with those first steps of setting up a project in xProcess and now you're ready to use a more configured process, in fact to use Basic Scrum 3. (Note processes can be easily changed in xProcess so it's very possible further changes have been made to this process by the time you read this article! The principles should hold though.)

These are the steps to go through to set up a Scrum project in xProcess:

1. Import the Scrum process into your data source.
   
2. Create a project (setting the various parameters in the New Project dialog)
3. Add project resources and give people the appropriate Scrum role (e.g. Product Owner, Scrum Master or Team Member)
4. Create the first Sprint
5. Create backlog items
6. Create a Delivery
7. Ensure Team Members update their tasks regularly.

The first two steps can be done separately or together. Firstly ensure you are in the Project Manager perspective (if you see either "Project Participant" or "Process Engineer" on the toolbar, click the icon and change to "Project Manager"). Then click on the "Projects" button on the Project Toolbar (on left usually) and then select "New". This brings up the dialog shown at the top of this page. Here you can select the Basic Scrum process and import it. Then at the top of the same dialog select this process and hit next. This brings up the dialog shown here.

More to come...

Getting started with Scrum-xProcess

There are several useful articles on Scrum-xProcess in the blog and if you're starting using the process it's worth having a browse of these to guide your initial set-up.

Using the pre-defined Scrum process - this is the first of a series of articles on using Scrum-xProcess. You can follow them sequentially from this article.
Don't burn out... Burn Down! - discussion of burndown charts.
Calculating team velocity - discussion of velocity and productivity.
Rescheduling tasks to the date you want - what to do when then auto-scheduler doesn't schedule a task when you want it!

I'm going to start a new article now to take you through step by step of setting up a Scrum process. Here's the link to that one... Scrum-xProcess: step by step.

Opening the source...

The source code of xProcess is finally being released today after several months discussion and negotiation concerning the ownership and licensing terms for the code. We settled on the GNU Affero General Public License and having dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's in the legal documents, it's finally out there. Enjoy!